воскресенье, 31 мая 2015 г.

I am afraid
this information is already known by most of the visitors of my blog, but nevertheless
I’ll write about that.

Elon Musk
is an American multi-millionaire, who was the cofounder of PayPal. Now he has a
lot of projects important for the entire world: in particular, he is the
founder of SpaceX, a company which constructs space rockets. It has developed
the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launch vehicles, which have already supplied a lot of
cargo into the orbit. Now Musk tries to create a reusable version of Falcon
(Falcon-9R), whose first stage will perform a soft landing. It is presumed that
if Musk succeeds, this technology will render the cost of space flights 5-10
times cheaper (at the moment, reusable rockets like Shuttle are less efficient
than the disposable ones).

The final
goal of Musk is the colonization of Mars by humans; he writes (and I fully
agree with him) that the colonization of space is needed to secure the humanity
against extinction (if a global catastrophe happens on Earth, caused by any
unexpected reasons related to technological progress, the humanity will survive
outside our planet and draw its conclusions).

As far as I
know, Musk has spent approximately 800 million dollars for the development of
his rockets, while the Russian government spent about 5.5 billions for the Angara rocket family, and NASA spent about 30 billions
for their new multi-usable rockets (not finished yet).

Another
project of Musk is Tesla Motors: a company which produces efficient electric
cars. The car Tesla S has won several awards and is very popular, in particular
due to the battery swapping technology.

Musk has
made open the Tesla patents, so probably soon his competitors will create their
clones of Tesla cars.

Besides
that, Musk is the chairman of SolarCity, a company which produces solar
batteries and charging stations. Musk has developed the Powerwall, a new solar
battery for home use. I suppose, it is possible that this technology will
change the world to no lesser extent than the shale gas. My main hope is that
such technologies will end the era or petrocracies like Russia and Iran.

It is
written that Musk was once near a bankruptcy, but at the moment his companies
are thriving.

Musk is one
of the US
“technocrats”, i.e. people who have earned billions of dollars with the
Internet. Among these people are Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, et al. Some of
these people have political activity – in particular, Zuckerberg and Musk once
took part in the FWD.us lobbying group which has a goal of immigration reform
(this reform would fight illegal migration, favoring migration into the US for
talented people). In 2013 Musk left the group because of some conflicts.

I think, if
a man has earned a billion of dollars, he must be quite motivated to make the
world better. It is even strange that usually this rule do not work (maybe, the
reason is that the financial aristocracy in the US is involved in collective
responsibility). Nevertheless, it seems for me that such people as Elon Musk
are really able to make the world better, and these people have already become
more important than such people as Barack Obama. Such people as men belonging
to the Rockefeller or Rothschild families have more money and power, but unlike
the “technocrats” they are not popular. This is my personal view of the
situation, and I am sorry if I misunderstand important things.